


Edges

by Linden



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 05:39:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1767523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean wants his brother, and Bobby isn't blind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译】Edges/边隅](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5588761) by [Milfoil_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milfoil_c/pseuds/Milfoil_c)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little thing that's been banging about my head for a bit.

**June 1997**

They were just outside of Boothbay, and at the edge of a burning grave, the first time he looked at Sammy and saw a young man looking back at him, slim and beautiful, instead of his skinny and sweet-faced baby brother. He didn’t think much of it at the time, just chalked it up to the head wound from which he was still, y’know, _bleeding_ , and to the leaping shadows all around them. Concussions were tricky sons of bitches, and it had been years since Dean had trusted anything he’d seen in the dark.

***

It happened the second time three weeks later in a crap motel room on the south edge of Raleigh, after Dean had spent a night hustling in a bar with smoky blues and easy marks. He came swimming back toward consciousness around 9:00 the next morning, to the blessed and desperately welcome scent of coffee in the air. Still half-asleep, he rolled onto his back, yawning, to find his father on the laptop and Sam shuffling around their crappy little kitchenette, rumple-haired and dressed only in a pair of battered jeans that had belonged to Dean three years and seventeen states ago. They were worn thin in the crotch and hanging loose off the sharp slender bones of his hips, and the white-hot jolt of _needwantlustloveSammy_ that hit Dean hard and sweet behind the ribs shocked him all the way awake.

‘Hey,’ Sam said, entirely oblivious to the fact that the world had clearly just _tilted off its fucking axis_. He held up a chipped mug. ‘You want coffee?’

After a minute Dean un-swallowed his tongue and sat up. ‘ . . . yeah,’ he managed, and then scrubbed a hand across his face and blew out a shaky breath. He took the mug with a muttered _thanks_ and without looking when his brother brought it over to him. He was just hung over, he decided. Clearly. He was just really, really hung over; actually, he was probably still drunk. Everything would be fine once he sobered the hell up. He’d just, you know, he’d just sit here, quietly, and avoid opening his eyes again until then.

And Jesus, he was never chasing whiskey shots with tequila again.

***

By the sixth time it happened, there was no head wound or hangover to blame (nor was there the adrenaline kick after a hunt, the adrenaline kick after a bar fight, or a bad porno in the background, which Dean had blamed for the third, fourth, and fifth times, respectively). There was just Sam—God help him, but there was just _Sam_ —stretching like a cat as he climbed out of the back of the Impala at a crappy gas station at dawn near Tallahassee, tee shirt damp with sweat along his broadening shoulders and down the sweet, vulnerable line of his spine. His hair was dirty and his clothes two days from clean, and there was an ugly red seam along his left cheek from where a harpy’s claw mark was healing, but Dean could no more have avoided the whip-crack of helpless _wanting_ that lashed across his bones than he could have stopped the goddamned sun from rising. 

Flushed and yawning and drowsy, Sam looked over at him across the roof of the car, their father still dozing in the front. ‘Want coffee?’ he asked, voice gritty with sleep.

Wordless, Dean pulled his wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to his brother; Sam caught it, still yawning, and shuffled off toward the minimart across the cracked, weedy lot— slim and shambling and graceful, jeans loose and low, his tee riding up a little over his hips and the warm bare hollow of his back. Dean braced his hands on the edge of the trunk and let his head drop down, just a little, eyes closed against the early, early light.

Jesus, he was _fucked_.

 


	2. Two

He was still fucked six weeks later, only worse and more so, when John dropped them at Bobby’s and took off on the trail of a water demon Jefferson needed help running down in Idaho, somewhere in the river that fed into Shoshone Falls. Dean sulked at being left behind for three days running until Bobby smacked him across the back of the head and pointed him at an ’84 Tempo that needed its engine block stitched up; Sam, on the other hand, was utterly delighted, and as one week bled into two, and two into three, he spent most of his time sprawled outside in one of Bobby’s loungers with a stack of Carl Sagan books and a Coke—frequently beside whatever car Dean was now working on, so that he could read bits he liked aloud to his brother. He was tanned to the color of cinnamon inside of a month and had red threaded through his mop of dark hair from the sun, stole Dean’s tee shirts when he didn’t want to do laundry and pushed into Dean’s space as though he belonged there, and in general drove him half-mad with stupid, helpless longing, because whatever utterly ridiculous Sam-shaped circuit had gotten flipped on inside him three months ago in Maine, Dean couldn’t shut it  _off_. He tried. He got the hell out of the salvage yard—picked up some hours bartending in town, at a comfortable dive whose owner owed Bobby enough of a favor that he didn’t look too closely at Dean’s ID, took care of a couple nearby salt-and-burns Bobby had been meaning to get to for awhile—and flirted outrageously with the waitress at the local diner and every woman under the age of forty at his bar; did considerably more than flirt in the alley behind it with a pretty boy passing through on his way to Spokane; and still felt a pull toward Sam as strong and sure as a planet orbiting a sun.

It was late evening, getting on toward the end of the hot, lazy, marvelously long dusk of South Dakota summers, and Sam was throwing knives at the heavy target Dean had knocked together for him in the front yard three weeks ago. Dean was, theoretically, reading about skinwalkers out here on Bobby’s porch, but he’d given up on that pretense awhile ago, and for the last fifteen minutes he’d been doing nothing but watching his little brother, the long lean lovely lines of him, as he tossed knife after knife through the late evening light, barefoot and shirtless in the heat. Sam was almost as good with guns as Dean was, had been since he was twelve, but he was a friggin’ artist with anything that had a blade, and when he was in the mood for it he could throw for an hour, thin blades arcing halfway across the yard in long spinning threads of iron or silver to thunk into the target, over and over, in whatever precise line or odd design struck his fancy, dying sunlight sparking along each edge. He made it look easy, and also lazy and deadly and really rather disturbingly hot, and Dean still didn’t know where the hell this. . . this  _crush_  had come from, but he knew he needed to get a damn handle on it, all the same. And he was going to. Any day now, he was going to, because whatever the hell kind of personal crisis it was that had him twisted up half to hell inside, it couldn’t possibly be  _permanent_. It couldn't. He was sure, he was absolutely sure, that if he just kept throwing more beer and girls and pretty boys in the general direction of it, it would eventually go away.

Well, he was mostly sure.

Pretty sure.

Would be sure, if any of the beer and girls and pretty boys he’d thrown at it thus far had actually helped at all, and if it weren’t currently taking a goddamned physical effort for him not to go tumble his brother into the warm dust of the yard and lick the salt off his shining skin.

The porch floorboards creaked. ‘You plannin’ on boilin’ your liver out here?’ a familiar voice inquired, and Dean looked around to find Bobby beside him, holding out a beer bottle that was sweating in the heat.  Dean took it, gratefully, as the older man sat down beside him, the swing rocking briefly beneath his weight. ‘‘Cause I gotta tell you, kid, I already got plenty of ‘em for spellwork downstairs.’

Dean took a long slug of blessedly cool beer. ‘I wanna know where you found ‘em?’

‘Probably not,’ the older man said, comfortably, and Dean grinned.

They sat quietly for awhile, easy in each other’s silence, the only sounds the steady, lethal rhythm of Sam’s knives hitting the target, and the shuffle of his bare feet as he moved back and forth across the yard to collect them. ‘He’s gotten good with those,’ Bobby said, after awhile longer.

Dean grinned again. ‘He’s freakin’ awesome with those, Bobby,’ he replied, because the kid  _was_. He’d been very deliberately pretending for the past half hour or so that he didn’t know Dean was watching him, but the patterns he’d been picking out ever since Dean had first come out on the porch had been growing increasingly more complex, and this last one he’d thrown had been freakin’  _epic_ , because he had his own four slim knives and the ten Bobby had loaned him from the attic, and there was now the outline of a near-perfect pentagram picked out in silver and iron across the yard. When Sam finally did sneak a glance up at the porch, eyes half-hidden behind his floppy bangs, Dean raised his beer in salute. ‘Not bad, squirt,’ he called, and couldn’t help but smile as the kid flushed and lit up like a goddamned Christmas tree. Sammy had a dozen different smiles, but this one—wide and dimpled, impossibly bright— was Dean’s favorite, always had been, and Dean hoarded his memories of the times he’d earned it in a quiet little corner of his heart. Their eyes held for a long sweet moment through the dusk, and Dean wanted . . . Jesus, he just  _wanted_.

‘C’n we go get ice cream?’ Sam called back, rolling his shoulder to stretch it. And grinned. ‘Since I’m freakin’ awesome?’

 Dean forgot, sometimes, that the little shit had ears like a bat.

‘Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,’ he replied, yawning.

Sam just looked up at him from the yard, still grinning, every inch a spoiled little brat who  _knew_  his big brother was going to cave, and Dean finally rolled his eyes and tossed his head toward the door. ‘Go get my wallet and get cleaned up and put some clothes on,’ he told him, and Sam whooped like a little boy and shot up the porch stairs and into the house. ‘And  _shoes_!’ Dean hollered after him through the open door, because Sam had almost entirely given up on them this summer, had just taken to wandering around Bobby’s like some barefoot hippie child, and if there were one person in the world who was gonna step on a rusty nail and lose, like, a toe or something to tetanus, God knew that it was Sam.

He frowned, considering.

‘Is he gonna lose a toe if he gets tetanus?’ he asked Bobby, because seriously, if that were a thing, he should probably be prepared.

Bobby said nothing for a moment, just sat looking down at the beer bottle in his gnarled hands. There was an odd sort of quality to his silence, and his mouth was set in the manner of a man who was facing an unpleasant task; Dean wasn’t certain the older hunter had even heard him, and was about to speak again when, utterly out of the blue and relating in no way Dean could ascertain to either toes or tetanus: ‘You know there’s nothin’ that boy wouldn’t do for you, ‘f you asked him,’ Bobby said, quietly.

Dean snorted around the mouth of his beer bottle. He had no idea where in the hell Bobby was coming from with this, but it was kinda hilarious all the same. ‘Uh-huh. Okay. Bobby, you’ve actually  _met_  my brother, right? He’s the mouthy shaggy-headed kid who just—’

‘Dean.’ His voice was unexpectedly serious; startled, Dean looked up from his beer to find the man watching him with an unreadable expression on his faded face. Bobby said nothing else for a long moment more, only looked at him with shrewd, level eyes, and then finally, very softly, ‘I’m gonna say this once, son, and only once, and then we are never havin’ this conversation again. But. Like I said. There’s nothing Sam wouldn’t do for you, nothing he wouldn’t give you, if you asked him for it, and you know that. So.’ Bobby’s voice was steady. ‘You be damn careful,’ he said, ‘what you ask him for.’

Dean was, for one brief, blessed moment, at a genuine loss as to what the hell he was talking about, before understanding hit him upside the head with all the finesse of a cast-iron frying pan.

Bobby knew.

Jesus Christ, Bobby  _knew_.

Funny, how fast all of the air in the world could vanish at once.

‘I’m not judgin’ you, kid,’ Bobby continued, gentle and gruff together. ‘You boys’ve been through hell together since you were babies, and what folks’ve got no room for in the normal world—well, that don’t much matter on the edges of it. But Sam is fourteen years old, and not some barfly you can leave in your rearview three days down the line. Something between the two of you goes sideways, you are both lookin’ at a world of hurt. You know that. I’m just reminding you, is all.’

Dean looked away from him, blindly, into the sunset light, throat and chest suddenly feeling three or four sizes too small. He had to say something; he knew he had to say something, anything: had to laugh, look bewildered, demand to know what in the hell Bobby was talking about, inquire wryly just what Bobby had been drinking after supper and whether he'd be willing to share. He was John Winchester’s son, and lying and misdirection came to him as easily as breath, but he couldn’t . . .  _he_   _couldn’t fucking breathe_ , and the only thing that came tripping out when his voice finally unstoppered the guilt and panic and misery in his throat was the truth. 

‘I'd never hurt him.' His words were unsteady, rasping things. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced in a breath, fought back the hot sting of tears behind his lashes, uncertain whether they were from shame or fear. 'I'd never—Bobby, you know that; you've _gotta_ know that; I would _never—_ '

‘Course I know that,’ the older man said. He took another pull on his beer, settled more comfortably into the creaking swing. 'Only reason you still got kneecaps, by the way.'

Dean managed a sharp, helpless half-laugh at that, looked down at his hands, one still clenched white-knuckled around his beer. He didn't realize he was chewing on his lip until he tasted the iron tang of his blood on his tongue. ‘He doesn’t know,’ he said, after a minute, voice still rough. ‘Sammy. He doesn’t know. And he’s never . . . he’s never gonna. I can  _fix_  this, Bobby; I can; I just need . . . I just need a little time.’

Bobby made a soft, noncommittal sound that could have meant anything or everything or nothing at all, stayed sitting warm and reassuring beside him, bottle neck held loose and easy in one big hand. Somewhere in the distance, coyotes began to howl, high and lonely and wild.

‘. . . are you gonna tell Dad?’ Dean asked, finally, and hated himself for the way his voice shook.

Bobby snorted. ‘Do I look like the damn town gossip to you?’ He polished off his beer, looked over at Dean for a long moment more, then sighed again and stood up in the dim glow of the sunset. ‘Like I said, we’re not having this conversation again. We’re not having a conversation  _about_  this conversation again, not unless you think we need to, and right now I’m gonna go drink enough whiskey to forget about it entirely. You think about what I said. ‘S all I’m asking.’ He clapped a heavy hand, calloused and warm, on Dean’s shoulder. 'You know where I am if you need me,' he said, and waited for the younger man to nod before he headed for the door. Dean didn’t watch him go. He kept his eyes on his hands, on his beer, picked at the label on the bottle with his thumb. The coyotes kept howling, and there was something about the chorus of sound that was strong and sweet and eerie and tore painfully into Dean's chest. 

Sam came tumbling out onto the porch shortly thereafter. ‘I want  _mint_ ,’ he announced, gleefully, tossing Dean his wallet. He’d washed his face, hair clinging damp to his temples, put on his battered old red trainers and one of Dean’s Zeppelin tees, the feather-soft grey one, worn tissue-thin at the collar and beneath both arms. Dean wanted to sling a rough arm around his shoulders and tuck him against his side like he would have three months ago as they walked; he wanted to tumble him into a warm messy bed and wrap him up and breathe him in; he wanted to put three thousand miles and possibly an ocean between them. ‘Or maybe cookies ‘n cream. Definitely a waffle cone, though. You ready?’

Dean looked up at his little brother, perched expectantly at the edge of the steps and limned in the last of the evening’s light—smiling and slim and tan and beautiful (Jesus, so fucking beautiful), and completely, utterly oblivious to the fact that he was everything in the world Dean wanted. 

_There’s nothing Sam wouldn’t do for you, nothing he wouldn’t give you, if you asked him for it, and you know that._

_I can fix this, Bobby; I can; I just need . . . I just need a little time._

‘Dean?’

He knocked back the last of his beer. ‘Yeah, kiddo,’ he said, standing, and in between one breath and the next bottled up everything he could of lust and heat and wanting, stoppered it, tucked it deep beneath his breastbone. Drew a breath. The pain of it was sharp and bright. ‘Yeah. Let’s go.’


End file.
